The following relates generally to methods for managing the operational efficiency of systems, such printer, scanners, and faxes that are networked together within an organization.
Network systems, such as printers, tend to be redundant services at different physical locations within a network community that may have some or no functional variability (e.g., color versus black and white). Generally when one system becomes unavailable, another system may be available to provide identical or substantially similar services located near the unavailable system. To exploit this redundancy, some printing systems are adapted to redirect print jobs when a printer is or becomes unavailable. For example, Windows 2000-based print servers and the Common UNIX Printing System™ (“CUPS™”) provide for the creation of printer pools or printer classes, respectively. Jobs sent to a pool (through a logical printer) or a class are sent to the first available printer in the class.
Other publications such as for example, EP 0996055 A2, EP 0917044 A2, and US 2003/0090697 A1, disclose different systems for redirecting print jobs in the event a printer becomes unavailable. These and other known systems generally do not consider individual user preferences, but instead rely on preset values to specify printer redirection. It would therefore be advantageous to provide a system that is adapted to automatically determine a preferred printer or set of printers to redirect a print job when the desired (or originally selected) printer is or becomes unavailable. It would be further advantageous if such a system were adapted to identify printer candidates to which a print job may be forwarded in the event a desired printer is or becomes unavailable without requiring any preexisting knowledge of the network infrastructure or arrangement of devices thereon.
In accordance with the various embodiments described herein, there is provided a method, system and article of manufacture, for managing a plurality of communicatively coupled systems forming part of an organization (or network neighborhood). The method includes the acts of: collecting job log data; determining a user community for each of the plurality of system using the job log data; calculating overlapping communities for pairs of the plurality of systems; defining a redirection matrix using the overlapping communities for managing operation of the plurality of system of the organization.
In accordance with other of the various embodiments described herein, there is provided a method, system and article of manufacture, for managing a plurality of communicatively coupled systems forming part of an organization. The method includes the acts of: collecting job redirection information; defining a redirection matrix using the job redirection information; and computing one or both of a network topology and clusters using the redirection matrix.
The advantages of the embodiments described herein provide that: (a) asymmetrical relationships between systems may be described using the redirection matrix; (b) the redirection matrix may be used as input for any number of system management visualization engines that may, for example, graphically represent the data to monitor interrelationships between elements of an organization's infrastructure; (c) the redirection matrix may be used to discover a customer's infrastructure, redundancies, and capacity; (d) redirection decisions are based on users habits and therefore tend to follow natural or expected and/or preferred user behavior; and (e) the redirection matrix can be used to determine clusters which may be in turn used to evaluate inter-cluster flows (i.e., inter-cluster dependencies).